The difference lies in the way growth is measured. Beijing uses a method that compares growth in one quarter with a full year earlier and says its economy expanded by a healthy 6.8 percent in the final quarter of 2008.
But experts say that compared to the previous three months — the system used by most other major countries — China’s growth fell to as low as 1 percent or possibly zero.
“The recent weakness is much worse than the long-term trend,” said JP Morgan economist Frank F.X. Gong. Merrill Lynch economist Ting Lu said fourth-quarter growth from the previous three months was “close to zero.”
The lower quarter-on-quarter growth figure would be in line with other indicators that show exports and manufacturing falling and weakness in investment and consumer spending.
Basically, they are saying the only reason that China is showing economic growth is because there was growth earlier in 2007.
Edit: It should be noted that the US is not a lot better when it comes to statistics. This from Dean Baker….
That may be hard to believe, but the economy almost certainly lost more jobs in January than the 597,000 job loss reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The reason is that BLS imputes jobs for new firms that are not included in its sample.
The formula used for calculating this imputation is backward looking, meaning that it depends on growth in prior quarters. When the economy takes a sharp turn in either direction, as it did last fall, the imputation is likely to be too high or too low, depending on the direction of change.